Ira Smith tends to get bored easily. At least, that’s how he explains a “retirement” that has been as busy – if not more so – than his professional working life.
Smith began his career in 1969, as a sales executive in the apparel industry on the East Coast. After nearly 20 years in that business, he switched gears and accepted a position as an executive recruiter in New York City in 1988, where he worked until his retirement in 2002.
This is when that dreaded boredom began to creep in.
“I had retired but, over the years, little things remained in the back of my mind with regard to doing other things,” related Smith, who now lives in the Atlanta area.
One of those “little things” was to run a bread route. So, a few years ago, he did just that, along with his son, Dan.
“We bought a bread route,” Smith said. “I ran it with my son and, within a year, we made it the number-one route for the company – out of 90 routes in Atlanta. And, eventually, it grew to become the number-eight route out of 900 bread routes in the Southeast.”
The Smiths would load the product onto their truck at a depot, and the deliveries would begin at 3:00 in the morning. Those deliveries would include some major accounts, such as Wal-Mart and Costco.
“We built the business,” Smith said. “When we bought it, the route was doing about $10,000 a week and, when we finished, it was averaging almost $18,000 a week.
“We felt pretty good about ourselves, given the fact that we were total rookies,” he added. “During out first week, every time we moved the truck we dumped the entire load. We were so totally clueless. But, within six month to a year, we were knocking it out with the best of them. And doing it pretty nicely.”
The company ended up buying back that route from Smith – and, because he and Dan had been so successful, eventually splitting the route into two.
With that chapter closed, Smith began looking forward to some of the other business options that had been running through his brain for years – and one of them was a laundromat.
“It’s something I had been thinking about since I was 20 years old,” he explained. “When I was in college, a good friend of mine and I were riding somewhere in the car and, as we passed a laundromat, he told me that a friend of his father owned a portion of that store as an investment. For some reason, that little seed stayed in my head – just thinking in terms of what a coin laundry is, what it means to a community, what it does and how it fares even in a down economic time.
“The point being that it is an essential service,” Smith continued. “You need to wash your clothing and the stability of that always stuck with me. I’ve always had a good feeling about the business.”
As Smith’s laundry business daydreams evolved into an actual business plan, he discovered that his new entrepreneurial venture was opening brand new avenues for him personally.
“All of a sudden, in about a six-month period, between the time in which I had signed with a distributor and the time I opened, I became a marketing expert, if you will,” he said. “I read literally every book I could get my hands on in terms of marketing, and I was starting to come up with all kinds of marketing ideas and things of that sort. Suddenly, I found something within myself, a creativity that I hadn’t really been aware of.”
Another aspect of running a coin laundry business that appealed to Smith was the work schedule flexibility it would provide him – especially after having to get up at 3 a.m. to deliver bread.
“If I felt I wanted to be there in the morning and not at night, I had that option,” he explained. “Or I could be there in the afternoon and not in the morning.”
With the help of Bill Kelson of 24/7 Laundry Distributors, Smith began searching for the perfect laundry site.
“Most of them were typical laundromat locations – on a main drag, in strip shopping centers on the outskirts of the city,” Smith noted.
However, when Kelson mentioned an existing store with a midtown Atlanta location, Smith’s eyes widened.
“I’m a New Yorker, so the idea of high density in terms of the population was very appealing to me, and this particular area is rather dense,” he explained. “It is 70 percent apartments, from a demographic point of view. Plus, it is near Georgia Tech. It’s in a hip type of neighborhood with good diversity. That’s what sold me on the neighborhood.
“When you look at all of the requirements needed for a successful coin laundry, the only things we’re missing are being located on a main drag and an abundance of the families in the area. But, on the flip side, we’re right smack dab in the middle of a high-density area where there are tons of apartments without laundry facilities. What we lose in family business, we more than make up for with individual customers.”
For the most part, the laundry customers in the neighborhood are urban singles, with a good percentage of them being students at either nearby Georgia Tech or Georgia State University.
“The neighborhood is rather diverse from an ethnic point of view, although it’s atypical compared to most other laundromats in that we have an almost nonexistent Hispanic population,” Smith said. “Also, we don’t have very many families, except for those that travel a little more of a distance, due to word of mouth.
“About 25 percent to 30 percent of our clients are students. The rest are singles, DINKs or perhaps young couples with smaller children that will drop off their drycleaning with us.”
Midtown Wash customers are approximately 75 percent Caucasian, 20 percent African-American and 5 percent Asian, Smith estimated.
The laundry itself, which Smith has appropriately named Midtown Wash, is a 2,450-square-foot storefront location in the middle of a residential neighborhood, consisting of mainly apartments. The other two businesses attached to the building are a hair salon and a small convenience store.
Parking for Midtown Wash is on the street, but Smith doesn’t consider that to be a disadvantage.
“It’s street parking but, given the nature of the demographics, not everybody here owns a car,” he said. “So, there are always spots open in front of my store or within a short walking distance. Plus, a good deal of my clientele actually walk to the store.”
The actual building is decades old, probably dating back to the 1920s, according to Smith. And a laundromat has operated out of that location since 1974.
“Here it was 2009, and the same equipment was still in the store,” Smith laughed. “Maybe that’s a testament to American manufacturing? After all, what lasts 35 years these days?”
Of course, Smith didn’t want to take a chance on 36 years, so he completely gutted and retrofitted the old store with new equipment and a bold, fresh new décor.
“I wound up paying rent for nearly five and a half months before we were able to open,” he said. “I want totally frustrated by the incredibly long lengths of time it took for the city to get an inspector out here or to issue a permit. In fact, I started paying rent on March 1 and construction on the actual store didn’t really begin until around July 4.”
However, once started, the renovation process flew by – and, in five or six weeks, it was a done deal.
“I had so much time to read everything I could, so I totally immersed myself in this business,” Smith explained. “There were very few surprises from the business perspective.”
All in all, the month-and-a-half project cost Smith in the neighborhood of $450,000, including the laundry equipment. And on August 11, Midtown Wash was open for business.
To recoup his initial investment in rehabbing the laundry, Smith was quick to begin advertising Midtown Wash – which is open 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily – to help get those brand new washers and dryers turning.
He regularly runs ads in two local weekly tabloids – one geared toward the gay community and the other focused on the entire area population in general. Smith also is a fan of targeted direct mail campaigns.
In addition, Smith has been building a strong word-of-mouth presence in the market with his business cards.
“On the backs of our cards are 10 little boxes,” he explained, “and customers get a box stamped every time they do a wash. Once they fill up all 10 boxes, they receive a free wash. That has been very effective in terms of customer retention. We don’t even have to ask them if they have their laundry cards anymore, because they’re standing at the counter waiting to get them stamped.”
For Smith, marketing starts from within.
“We’ve done everything inside this laundry to make it something that somebody might want to mention to a friend or neighbor,” he said. “It’s clean, it’s bright and we’ve got great music running through the store. We’ve got a flat-screen television. We offer free coffee and are currently in the process of setting up a cappuccino machine. We have snack and drink vending, and we offer over-the-counter soap sales, as well as soap through our vending machine. There is a suggestion box. It goes on and on.”
Smith – who works in the store with his wife, Rochelle, and son – added that perhaps his greatest assets are his three part-time attendants.
“The attendants are instructed to greet each and every customer,” he said. “We thank each and every customer. We help them carry their clothes out, and we help them carry it in. It’s almost like a valet laundromat: ‘Do you have your laundry card today? Have you been here before? Can I show you around?’”
And that service goes beyond the walk-in customer, too. Midtown Wash offers its patrons a wash-dry-fold option, at $1.25 per pound. And, Smith sees commercial accounts in his future as well.
“It’s part of the business plan,” he said. “My feeling is, ‘Let’s learn the retail business first, before we start going after commercial accounts.’ But, being located where we are, there is a plethora of businesses in midtown Atlanta. There are number of hotels, restaurants, and medical and therapy practices, along with hair salons and businesses of that nature. There is so much opportunity.”
And Smith is not one to miss out on business opportunities.
In fact, he recently donated 80 scientific calculators to the local high school and ended up landing that school’s drop-off drycleaning account for its band uniforms.
“It was about being a part of the community, and then one thing led to another,” he explained.
In fact, Midtown Wash’s drop-off drycleaning business has become “extremely profitable,” according to Smith.
“We charge $3.75 per item, and it costs us $1.25,” he divulged. “It gives us the leeway to offer 10 pieces for $30, so we’re marketing this segment of the business that way.”
The store owner also does his own alterations.
“On occasion, I’m able to do some repairs right here,” he said, with a chuckle. “I worked in a tuxedo rental store when I was in college and helped the tailor quite a bit, so I learned a few things here and there. There are some things I can do, and other things I need to send out.”
In addition to his sewing skills, Smith feels that his real business strength lies in the customer service aspect of Midtown Wash.
“We treat the customer that way we want to be treated,” he stated. “I think they appreciate that. If they’re having a problem, I ask them how we can fix that problem. It’s appealing to the customers’ sense of fair play, and they don’t take advantage of it.
“I just want to absorb everything,” he added. “I’m still enjoying it. I’m still enjoying watching it grow, and that’s the real kick for me. I love the business. I’m in the store six or seven days a week. I love waking up and getting here. I love being here. I came into this wide-eyed, and everything seems to be coming around the way it was supposed to.”